Hubbell Incorporated (NYSE: HUBA, HUBB ) today announced that Timothy H. Powers, President and Chief Executive Officer, will make a presentation at the J.P. Morgan Basics and Industrials Conference. The Hubbell presentation is scheduled to begin at 8:30 AM ET on Monday, June 5, 2006.

The live audio of the event will be webcast on the corporate home page at www.hubbell.com. To access the webcast from the Hubbell home page, click on “Investor Relations” and then “Calendar of Events” at the appropriate time. The presentation will be archived 24 after the event, to access the presentation at a later date, click on “Investor Relations” and “Audio Archives”. Read more »

A local furniture manufacturer has made display space available in its showroom for the Maine Highlands Guild.

Along with Moosehead Manufacturing Co.’s products and its new line of furniture called J. Wentworth, the company’s store offers an assortment of guild offerings from handbags to jewelry.

The public was invited last week to view the company’s line and the guild’s new display. Of the approximately 50 artisans in the guild, about 20 have their wares in the Main Street store. Read more »

‘The office furniture market in the UAE is estimated between AED 700 million and 1 billion, and the carpets and flooring another AED 1 billion,’ said Ajai Dayal, General Manager, Retail and Marketing, Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group.

The residential and commercial property market in the Middle East has been moving at an incredible pace and this has led to an increase in demand for new office space and exponential growth in the office furniture business,’ he added.

OFIS – the furniture, flooring and interior solutions business of the Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group – will participate in ‘Office 2006′, the Middle East’s premier exhibition in office furniture solutions.

Focusing on aesthetics and ergonomic design, OFIS will showcase a wide range of the latest in office furniture and flooring. The brands on show include premium wooden flooring from Parador, Germany; Della Valentina Office systems, free standing desks and storage ideas from Italy; modular desks, storage and partitioning systems from India’s BP Ergo; German engineered ergonomic chairs from Dauphin; Interface flooring solutions, broadloom carpets from Bentley Prince Street and Beaulieu of America, and furniture from Kembo in Holland. Read more »

Neville Tuli is looking for $33.5 million to invest in what may be India’s hottest market: Art.

Soaring prices for contemporary Indian works prompted the chairman of Mumbai-based Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art Ltd. to start the nation’s second art investment fund. Osian, with sale rooms in New Delhi and Mumbai, will start raising money on June 5, Tuli said in an interview.

Days after the Mumbai stock exchange had its biggest weekly drop since 2001, a painting by Indian-born Francis Newton Souza sold at auction for a record $1.2 million. Prices of works by Indian artists such as Souza, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta and Maqbool Fida Husain are being driven up by a global surge in art investment, coupled with growth in Asia’s fourth-biggest economy that has swollen the ranks of the nation’s wealthy.

“The affluent are coming in,” said Pradipta K. Mohapatra, Chennai-based collector and chief executive for technology at RPG Enterprises, an Indian group with interests from software to supermarkets. “Young executives at banks and in information technology are the new breed, buying art for the love of it.”

Mohapatra, who has been buying art for three decades, said an oil painting by Yusuf Arakkal that he bought eight years ago for 45,000 rupees is now worth about 1 million rupees. His most recent purchase is a color pencil sketch of a nude woman by K.C.S. Pannikar for 65,000 rupees.

An investor in Osian’s fund will need to put in at least 1 million rupees ($22,300) for a minimum of three years, said Tuli. Read more »

The Vermont Arts Council has launched its largest community art project ever.

Vermonters around the state are turning thousands of wooden artists’ palettes into paintings, sculptures, musical instruments and other works of art.

“Some of them are whimsical and humorous, some are serious, and some are landscape-y and some are just bizarre,” said Alexander Aldrich, executive director of the Vermont Arts Council. “It’s just a wonderful catalog of creative output.”

The state launched the Palettes of Vermont project in January. Since then, the Vermont Arts Council has given away nearly 7,000 wooden palettes produced by the Vermont Wood Makers Association and 30,000 paper palettes.

Dozens of communities and 142 schools are taking part.

Folk artist Warren Kimble, a council trustee, came up with the idea after creating three community art projects in Brandon.

“The really exciting thing is the way this project is bringing people together,” said Diane Manion Scolaro, communications and development director.

The city of St. Albans hopes to create the world’s largest palette. The Guinness Book of World Records said the 12-by-16-foot feat is a first, said Karen Bresnahan, executive director of St. Albans for the Future, a downtown revitalization group.

On Saturday, around 50 people stopped by a city park to help paint the palette covered with images of trains, a city fountain and agricultural landscape. Read more »

Paris is set to introduce millions of people to the wonders of Australian Indigenous art.

On June 23, President Jacques Chirac will open the city’s newest museum, the Musee due Quai Branly.

Tucked away near the Eiffel Tower, it is a multi-million dollar monument to non-Western art and it will permanently pay homage to Australia’s Indigenous culture.

The museum commissioned eight artists to fill more than 2,500 square metres of the buildings ceilings, walls and facades.

Hetti Perkins, co-curator of the Australian Indigenous art component, says it is President Chirac’s pet project.

“So you don’t get any better credentials than that really,” she said.

“What’s wonderful for us as Australians is that the architect Jean Nouvel included in his winning proposal for the new museum the idea that Australian Indigenous artists only would make works that would become part of the permanent fabric of one of the buildings on the site,” she said.

While there will be specific small pieces of art within the gallery, the walls and ceiling of the building have become a huge canvas, wrapped in images from the Dreamtime and more contemporary visions of Australia. Read more »

Three London auction houses are offering 19th- and 20th-century Russian art worth as much as $51 million this week, a month after New York sales broke records.

The sales of paintings, sculptures, icons, porcelain, arms and Faberge works open today at MacDougall Arts Ltd. with an auction the company estimates may fetch 5 million pounds ($9.4 million). Sotheby’s Holdings Inc. says its sale tomorrow may reap 20 million pounds. Bonhams, which ends the auctions on June 1, expects about 2.5 million pounds.

Sotheby’s New York office sold $46.7 million worth of art on April 26, the most profitable Russian sale in history. The flow of art from private European and U.S. collections to a growing class of wealthy Russians may accelerate, dealers say.

“The high prices are bringing out paintings that even someone like myself, who has been in the Russian paintings business longer than anyone, had no idea existed,” said Ivan Samarine, a founder of Sotheby’s Russian department and now head of Russian sales at Stockholms Auktionsverket. Read more »

Mr Price Group chief executive Alastair McArthur said he believed knock-down, or kit-form, furniture would become a significant part of the company’s furniture and homeware business in the future.

More than 60 years ago, 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad founded the Swedish knock-down furniture retailer Ikea, which has since gobbled up market share from traditional European rivals with its cheap but stylish wooden tables and chairs. Ikea now has stores in at least 35 countries and annual sales of about R107 billion.

Ikea had surprised some by not entering the fast-growing South African market, but McArthur said he thought Ikea had decided to focus growth on bigger eastern European markets. Read more »

An agreement has been reached in the case of a Lexington furniture store that closed it’s doors while still owing many customers merchandise.

Attorney General Greg Stumbo announced Friday that an agreement has been reached with Norwalk Furniture Corporation of Norwalk, Ohio. The corporation will fulfill outstanding furniture orders placed by approximately 82 customers of the Lexington Norwalk franchise store, located in Hamburg Place.

The operator of that franchise, Danny Hillard, abruptly closed the business earlier this month. Stumbo’s office received nearly two dozen complaints from consumers who made deposits but have not received furniture. Read more »

Durian, the king of fruit’s, is being threatened by a shortage of rubber wood for the furniture industry.

Although durian trees, as a source of timber, are nothing to shout about, more and more furniture makers are turning them into tables and chairs.

And many durian growers in Johor who were hit by low prices for durian in the past years are chopping down their trees and selling the timber for quick profits.

Muar Furniture Association deputy chairman Lim Su Kim said the industry was short of 10,000 tonnes of rubber wood a month. Read more »